The person’s position-taking in the shaping of schizophrenic phenomena (original) (raw)
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ABSTRACT: The present paper clarifies key issues in phenomenology and phenomenological psychopathology (especially of schizophrenia) through a critique of a recent article that addresses these topics. Topics include: 1, Phenomenology’s role in clarifying issues not amenable to purely empirical methods. 2, The relationship between a phenomenological approach (focusing on the subjective life of the patient) and empirical science, including neuroscience. 3, The nature of self-experience, especially in its pre-reflective form (“ipseity”—involving “operative intentionality”), and its possible disturbance in schizophrenia (“hyperreflexivity” and “diminished self-affection”). 4, The relationship between self disturbance in schizophrenia and disorders of both temporality and (what Husserl termed) “passive syntheses.” 5, The role of intentional or quasi-volitional processes in the perceptual (and other) disorders in schizophrenia. 6, The nature and diversity of phenomenology’s potential contribution to the enterprise of “explanation.” 7, The meaning of several concepts: “hermeneutic” or “existential” approach; phenomenological “reflection”; “negative symptoms.”
Generating Sense: Schizophrenia and Phenomenological Praxis
Schutzian Research 3 (2011): 121-132
The aim of phenomenology is to provide a critical account of the origins and genesis of the world. This implies that the standpoint of the phenomenological reduction is properly extramundane. But it remains an outstanding task to formulate a credible account of the reduction that would be adequate to this seemingly impossible methodological condition. This paper contributes to rethinking the reduction accordingly. Building on efforts to thematize its intersubjective and corporeal aspects, the reduction is approached as a kind of transcendental practice in the context of generativity. Foregrounding the psychotherapeutic encounter with persons suffering schizophrenic delusion as paradigmatic of the emergence of shared meaning, it is argued that this is where we may best come to terms with the methodological exigencies of phenomenology’s transcendental aim. It follows that phenomenologists across all disciplines may have something important to learn from how phenomenology has been put into practice in the psychotherapeutic domain.
Phenomenological Psychopathology and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Approaches and Misunderstandings
The present paper clarifies key issues in phenomenology and phenomenological psychopathology (especially of schizophrenia) through a critique of a recent article that addresses these topics. Topics include (1) Phenomenology's role in clarifying issues not amenable to purely empirical methods; (2) The relationship between a phenomenological approach (focusing on the subjective life of the patient) and empirical science, including neuroscience; (3) The nature of self-experience, especially in its pre-reflective form ("ipseity"-involving "operative intentionality"), and its possible disturbance in schizophrenia ("hyperreflexivity" and "diminished self-affection"); (4) The relationship between self-disturbance in schizophrenia and disorders of both temporality and (what Husserl termed) "passive syntheses"; (5) The role of intentional or quasi-volitional processes in the perceptual (and other) disorders in schizophrenia; (6) The nature and diversity of phenomenology's potential contribution to the enterprise of "explanation"; and (7) The meaning of several concepts: "hermeneutic" or "existential" approach, phenomenological "reflection," and "negative symptoms."
L'Evolution psychiatrique, 2022
Objectives.-This theoretical paper discusses the integration of a "territorial self" alongside the minimal and narrative selves most commonly described by contemporary phenomenology and used by phenomenological psychopathology. Methods.-We start from the schizophrenic experience and the tools for understanding it, in order to highlight some limitations in the use of vocal communication within the clinical system to evoke phenomena that are a priori pre-linguistic. Results.-This theoretical path, which requires an openness to clinical observation and intersubjectivity, leads to nosographic and therapeutic implications that seem useful to us from a phenomenological perspective. Discussion.-From a nosographic standpoint, we discuss the (nonsystematic) crossovers between the schizophrenic experience and the psychotic experience; whereas, from a therapeutic standpoint, the proposal of the territorial self allows us to insist on the fact that the clinical relationship is characterized as much by an analysis of experience and a discussion about it as it is by a joint practice and an experiential experience requiring a common ground. ଝ To quote this article please use the French princeps version: Englebert J. Le « soi territorial » : propositions théoriques à partir d'une compréhension phénoménologique de la schizophrénie. Evol Psychiatr 2021;86(4): pages (for the print version) or URL [date of consultation] (for the electronic version). * .
Phenomenological understanding of psychosis
Existential Analysis, 2008
What characterizes any phenomenological approach is the attempt to conceptualize in as close connection with the actual experience of the phenomena as possible. Thus, we have to look for the intentionality in the psychosis, the wild and chaotic structuring of meaning as angst. For psychosis basically has to do with angst in a sense that has been explicated by existentialism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. The seemingly meaningless expressions of intentionality in psychosis are not so very surprising on the background of Merleau-Ponty's explications of corporeal intentionality. In his close investigations of intentionality in perception, the body, and language Merleau-Ponty laid open a structuring of meaning which, however incoherent it may be, is sociocultural structuring and which we never escape in our own experience and practice. It is possible to apply different kinds of phenomenological understanding and conceptualization in accord with Merleau-Ponty's philosophical position. We may distinguish between a structural, a generative and a dialectic understanding of human experience and practices. The application of these approaches implies a constructive criticism of traditional phenomenological views of psychosis and points towards a new understanding of intentionality in psychosis.
The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation
Rebuilding reality: A phenomenology of aspects of chronic schizophrenia
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2005
Schizophrenia, like other “pathological” conditions, has not been systematically included in the general study of consciousness. By focusing on aspects of chronic schizophrenia, we attempt to survey one way of remedying this omission. Some basic components of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of human experience (intentionality, synthesis, constitution, epoche, and unbuilding) are explicated in detail, and these components are then employed in an account of exemplary aspects of chronic schizophrenia. We maintain that in schizophrenic experience some very basic constituents of reality – constituents so basic we call them “ontological” – are lost so that the patient must try to explicitly re-constitute those ontological features of the world.
Phenomenology, Schizophrenia, and the Varieties of Understanding
Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2022
This is a commentary on Humpston, C. S. (2022). “Isolated by Oneself: Ontologically Impossible Experiences in Schizophrenia.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 29(1), 5–15. It is published with an additional commentary by H. Green and Humpston’s response.
Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological-Anthropological Approach
Reconceiving Schizophrenia. Edited by Man Cheung Chung, K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford, and George Graham, 2007
We shall approach schizophrenia from the point of view of phenomenological anthropological psychiatry. We shall first provide a brief introduction to the phenomenological-anthropological point of view. This introduction will provide the context for explicating the basic phenomenological concepts that we will borrow from Edmund Husserl (1973, 1983) and apply to schizophrenia, namely, intentionality, synthesis, and constitution. We shall then address schizophrenic experience as a whole, insisting that the transformation of human experience that it involves affects even the most basic ontological constituents of the world, namely, space, time, causality, and the nature of objects. It will be necessary at that juncture to distinguish between an early stage of schizophrenia and a later one. We shall then be prepared to focus on the peculiar nature of schizophrenic hallucinations, first through an anthropological description of them and subsequently through a phenomenological one. We conclude by briefly addressing one final puzzle: if schizophrenic hallucinations exhibit the characteristics we attribute to them, why do the people who encounter them experience them with such certainty?
“The Delirious Illusion of Being in the World”: Toward a Phenomenology of Schizophrenia
Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically: Phenomenological Theory of Subjectivity and the Psychoanalytic Experience. Eds: D Lohmar and J Brudzinska. Phaenomenologica, 2012, Volume 199, 269-281, 2011
Our title is an excerpt from a statement by Antonin Artaud, the poet, playwright, and actor, who was almost certainly schizophrenic. Born in Marseilles in 1896, Artaud died in Paris in 1948. In 1937 on a boat to Ireland, he had to be placed in a straightjacket after threatening to harm himself. Eight of his fifty-two years he spent in mental institutions in Rouen, Paris, and Rodez, 6). Artaud was one of those relatively rare individuals who succeeded in harnessing certain aspects of his schizophrenia to serving a revolutionary creativity. Most people afflicted with schizophrenia remain incapable of creative breakthroughs. As we shall see, however, with the onset of schizophrenia the individual is liberated from the structures and norms that powerfully govern normal human experience. In this condition even the most basic formations of the world-taken-for-granted, the lifeworld, are shaken. In the place of these previously habitual structures, new visions emerge. If the individual can somehow manage to control and shape these novel images, genius – in most cases an initially bewildering genius – may perhaps flourish. Here we shall not examine the creativity that may – albeit rarely – issue from schizophrenic mental life. We shall rather analyze the more common forms of schizophrenia, forms that bring on only severe suffering and hardship without the compensation of greater originality. We shall approach these more common components from the point of view of phenomenological-anthropological psychiatry. We shall first provide a brief introduction to the phenomenological-anthropological perspective. This introduction will paint the background for our own explication of basic phenomenological concepts, namely, intentionality, synthesis, constitution, automatic and active mental life, and the ego. We shall then address schizophrenic mental life as a whole, claiming that the transformation of experience that it entails affects even the most basic ontological constituents of the world, namely, space, time, causality, and the nature of objects. This phenomenological discussion will allow us to adapt a set of concepts from philosophical anthropology and apply it to schizophrenia, namely, the concept of “world openness” and the need to reduce that openness. We shall focus on one of the more puzzling aspects of schizophrenia, what psychiatrists call “thought insertion." We shall then all-too-briefly indicate the difference between an early stage of schizophrenia and a later one.